February 20, 2017

Cherrypick is one of the most useful commands in Git. It is used to apply a commit that is present on another branch, on the current branch. Let's see an example to understand this better.

Let’s say you have two branches feature1 and feature2 as in the following picture.

Now, the green commit 5 on branch 2, has some interesting code that you want on feature1. How would you get that? You are probably thinking about merge/rebase. But with that you will get all the other green commits from 1–4 as well, which you don’t want.
Cherrypick for the rescue!.

Assuming you are on feature1, all you have to say is

git cherry-pick green5 (Assuming 'green5' is the commit id)

And that’s it. You will have the green5 commit on your orange4 commit like in this picture as you wanted.

Notice, that the green commit is no longer “5” but has been changed to “5′”. This is to show that, though the changes (change set is the git term) in the commit remain the same, Git will generate a new commit hash for this because hashes take parent node also into account.

And that is all you need to know about Cherry picking. So, Go ahead and pick some cherries!